AN: I don't own anything except for the Plotbunnies :)
Special thanks to Lucy for being my Beta!
Enjoy and review please!
It was almost 7 PM, when an exhausted John Watson turned the keys to 221B Baker Street. The day at the surgery had been long enough, and just before his shift ended, a gang of youngsters had apparently decided to settle an argument. In the end it meant several hours of overtime. On top of this, Sherlock had been the usual pain in the arse and sent John on a quest for milk and nicotine patches.
On days like these, John pondered if he should make his life easier with a little bit of magic. But then again, he had never been the type to wave his wand at everything. Opposed to the belief of Harry, not all wizards were lazy and never even moved except for waving a wand. In fact, John's oak wand was normally safely hidden within the most boring book he could find, in the hope that Sherlock wouldn't venture to search his books.
As John passed the flat of their landlady, Mrs. Hudson opened the door and motioned for John to come inside. For a moment John pondered asking the older lady if whatever she needed could wait until he had had some tea. But he noticed her worried face and shrugged the thought off, before following her inside.
"Oh dear, I hope Sherlock doesn't come down now...oh well it can't be helped now! Come in dear, and take a look at this," she started and led John into her living room, where a cardboard box was sitting on the table. With a gesture towards the box, she began to explain.
"Sherlock wanted to start some experiments with explosives in the kitchen this morning. So I took his skull hostage in the hope to keep him from blowing up the whole house. He complied and took the stuff out, so I wanted to put the skull back tomorrow. But Hatty, a friend of mine, came over and knocked over the box with the skull..."
John nodded gravely, he couldn't blame Mrs. Hudson for taking the skull to keep the house safe. Cautiously, he peered into the box and saw many bone fragments piled up inside.
"Oh, it looks quite a mess. Does Sherlock know about it?" he asked her, dreading an answer. If Sherlock saw the demolished skull they were going to face hell itself. He could imagine Sherlock torturing his violin for days or more, this being only the start, he would be insufferable!
"Not yet, thank god! I was hoping you could try to glue it back together before he sees it," the older woman answered, knowing exactly what John was fearing. Normally Sherlock was much nicer to her than to most other people. But if he found out that she was responsible for destroying his skull, she had no idea what the detective would do.
"Oh... " John answered looking once again doubtfully into the box. There was no way Sherlock would miss the breaking edges, no matter how carefully he worked. Piecing the skull back together was one thing, but the thing was completely in shards!
"Mrs Hudson I'm not sure..." he started, but he saw the anxious face of their landlady and decided that he couldn't let her down. She endured way too much with Sherlock and him already. He couldn't possibly refuse helping her.
"You know... I'll try to get it back together... Maybe it will work !"
"Thank you John, I hope he just won't notice what happened," Mrs. Hudson answered relieved and handed John the box.
"No problem, Sherlock is quite a handful already, better not poke the sleeping dragon!" John answered, and left for his room.
A few minutes later, John tiptoed through the apparently empty flat. He deposited the milk in the fridge, shoving aside a plate with severed fingers, and dumped Sherlock's patches onto the couch before he crept upstairs into his room to attend to the skull.
With a huff he emptied the box unceremoniously onto his bed and seated himself next to the heap. Sighing he took a few shards and tried to fit them together, tracing the resulting joints with his fingers. This was never going to work!
After considering his options, John dumped the shards back onto the pile and wriggled out of his jacket, before walking over to one of his cabinets. He had to rummage around a bit and retrieved a slim wooden box out of the depths of the bottom drawer. He sat back onto the bed and carefully took his wand out of the box. It was old and made of dark oak wood with a spiral inlay of lighter maple wood for a handle. He hadn't used it at all, since he moved in with Sherlock. The detective was just too observant to risk it, and unlike wizards from pureblood families, John didn't use magic to cope with his every-day life. He had never seen the need to save a few minutes just with magic, and he didn't find a muggle life boring or dull.
The last time, he had used his wand was in Afgahnistan. They had saved a soldier with severe head injuries. John remembered him telling the others about his pregnant wife and the baby that was due soon. After the injury he didn't even know who or where he was, so John went to his bunk in the field hospital and cured the damages to the brain. The man would still take months to heal, but at least he would remember his family again!
Looking back at the pile of bones in front of him, John shrugged off the memory and flicked his wand at the remains of Sherlock's skull, muttering "Reparo!"
The first few seconds, nothing happened, so John waited and watched as the fragments started to float and then whizz around in a sphere about the size of Sherlock's precious skull. The doctor could hear the soft clicks, where the fragments fell into pieces, and slowly the skull was visible in the swirl of shards. It took only about a minute for the spell to work and the skull dropped onto John's bed with a soft thud, as good as new. Smiling, John picked it up and traced over the now smooth surface. The spell had worked perfectly, but then again he had always been good in Charms.
There was no way Sherlock would ever notice that anything had been amiss with the skull, so John got up and placed the skull back into the box. He put his wand into the pocket of his jeans and pulled his jumper down a bit to conceal it, before he went down to bring the skull back to Mrs. Hudson.
Just a few minutes after John had shut the door behind his room, the doors of his wardrobe creaked open, and revealed a very much perplexed Sherlock inside...
